You know who the busiest man in the startup world is right now? Pinterest’s newly-minted CEO Ben Silbermann, who from what we’re hearing is so preoccupied with shipping product that he hasn’t been taking any investors’ calls.
And there are a lot of freakin’ calls (Fact: Silbermann’s voice mailbox is full). EVERYONE wants Pinterest to raise a C-round, and is trying every which way they can to get a precious slice of time with the modest Silbermann, who hasn’t taken a formal meeting with anybody yet according to a source, compounding the whole supply vs. demand problem.
We’re hearing that biggies DST, Sequoia, Benchmark and basically name-an-important-investor all want a piece of Pinterest, at a high enough valuation to be tempting enough to first-time entrepreneur Silbermann — with people tossing out numbers in the north of a billion range.
A billion is not shocking considering the company’s scale and these frothy times, especially when we’re hearing that Quora and Instagram are also raising at about half of that.
Still it is a Pinteresting proposition (sorry), Pinterest just raised a $27 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $200 million valuation, so this would mean that the company 5x’d in a little over six months. The company could easily raise another $50-70 million in this hypothetical one-billion-plus C-round, in what one investor called, “The hottest deal he’s ever seen.” Yeah, especially considering it doesn’t actually exist.
Reports of this imaginary round aside, people familiar with the matter hold that Silbermann most likely won’t raise money again, and that the current $37.5 million stash should last the 28-person team a while as they continue with their “slow and steady wins the race” mode of development. Speaking of which, Pinterest today launched a feature that allows you to change the covers on your Pinterest albums, which you can do by clicking on the album and then, “Change cover.”
Great, now I can finally get The Verge logo off the front of my Tech News pinboard. It’s the little things.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/05/pinterest-has-an-invitation-to-the-billion-dollar-startup-club-but-will-it-accept/
And there are a lot of freakin’ calls (Fact: Silbermann’s voice mailbox is full). EVERYONE wants Pinterest to raise a C-round, and is trying every which way they can to get a precious slice of time with the modest Silbermann, who hasn’t taken a formal meeting with anybody yet according to a source, compounding the whole supply vs. demand problem.
We’re hearing that biggies DST, Sequoia, Benchmark and basically name-an-important-investor all want a piece of Pinterest, at a high enough valuation to be tempting enough to first-time entrepreneur Silbermann — with people tossing out numbers in the north of a billion range.
A billion is not shocking considering the company’s scale and these frothy times, especially when we’re hearing that Quora and Instagram are also raising at about half of that.
Still it is a Pinteresting proposition (sorry), Pinterest just raised a $27 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $200 million valuation, so this would mean that the company 5x’d in a little over six months. The company could easily raise another $50-70 million in this hypothetical one-billion-plus C-round, in what one investor called, “The hottest deal he’s ever seen.” Yeah, especially considering it doesn’t actually exist.
Reports of this imaginary round aside, people familiar with the matter hold that Silbermann most likely won’t raise money again, and that the current $37.5 million stash should last the 28-person team a while as they continue with their “slow and steady wins the race” mode of development. Speaking of which, Pinterest today launched a feature that allows you to change the covers on your Pinterest albums, which you can do by clicking on the album and then, “Change cover.”
Great, now I can finally get The Verge logo off the front of my Tech News pinboard. It’s the little things.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/05/pinterest-has-an-invitation-to-the-billion-dollar-startup-club-but-will-it-accept/
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